The authors used NHANES 1999 to 2018 linked to the National Death Index to build five models predicting all-cause mortality in 2,428 adults with both type 2 diabetes and hypertension, among whom 719 (29.6%) died over a median 6.75 years. Random forest reached an AUC of 0.873 (95% CI 0.856 to 0.891), above light gradient boosting (0.785), XGBoost (0.792) and logistic regression (0.783), with age, race, chronic kidney disease, BMI and blood urea nitrogen the leading features. Validation was internal to the survey sample.
Why it is interesting: A tree ensemble outperformed logistic regression on this cohort, though no external cohort was tested to confirm it.